people of this decade are more likely to send e-mails, messages and play games on their cell phones instead of using them to talk to people. Teenagers listen to music and surf the Internet for vital information. Girls often go to restrooms to send progress reports about dates to their friends. Poets and musicians write down thoughts in their cell phones and memorize them for work or home. Young kids are e-mailed by their parents or their guardians about their whereabouts. Expert cell phone users can type 100 Chinese characters per minute (the equivalent of 100 words per minute in the English language). Young women between the ages of 10 and 19 spend almost one hundred minutes (1.65 hours) a day on a cell phone; compared to the national average of 18 minutes. People use cell phones in Japan to find apartments for rent, follow the results of each and every Sumo match, download horoscopes, and check out the most popular pop music songs on the charts. Kanji is now used less frequently thanks to cell phones; leading to a dumbing down of the Japanese language. Cell phones in Japan are arguably the world's most advanced. However, most models do not work outside Japan. Many use their cell phones to tap to into service that send messages about bargain prices. The Japanese even use their cell phones to do grocery shopping. Sales using cell phones have increased by 51.4 billion yen from 2003 to 2004. Population decline The 1990s were the final decade where the birth rate in Japan would exceed the death rate. Young people lacking money and living space to properly reproduce is just one of many reasons the birth rate plummeted starting in the year 2005. It has been suggested that the population of Japan will fall from over 100 million in the 1990s to a mere 95.2 million by the year 2050. However, the most recent rise in the national birth rate of Japan happened in February 2007. Japan will see a 0.9% decline of their population after the year 2025 - lowering their labor force while countries like Canada will see a rise in their labor force by that same year. More than 100000 new jobs were added in Canada by the end of April 2010 alone. Shimojō, a village in the prefecture of Nagano, has an approximate population of 4169. This village is the